Sunday, September 30, 2018

Absolute certainty is the enemy of collaboration, measured judgements and maturity

The
search for truth in a boiling cauldron of sex, power, ambition and lies is a
dangerous and interminable drama.

The United States political culture, “that boiling
cauldron,” is not a culture that either supports or enables the discovery of ‘the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth” so help me God! Sending the FBI off to
do what is termed a further background investigation of one, Brett Kavanaugh,
restricted to the names already known through the courageous evidence of one
Dr. Christine Blassy Ford, under the political pressure of irate phone calls,
emails and direct confrontations at Senate Office Building elevator doors (Sen.
Jeff Flake) was clearly not on the agenda of the sexual-predator president’s
radar.

And then, in an off-handed manner to reporters on his
way to another campaign rally in West Virginia, for the president to say ‘they
have a free hand to go wherever they have to’ is more than disingenuous; it is
another of the litany of deceptions, cover-ups and dissemblings that
characterize both the chief executive and his nominee’s defense of his
appointment to the Supreme Court. As James Comey, fired FBI Director tweeted, “Small
lies matter!”

Much has been written and pontificated by talking
heads on television, about the dramatic differences in the demeanour of Kavanaugh
and Blassy Ford in their respective testimonies. Responses from Republican Senators
especially, has been predictably supportive of Kavanaugh, while the Democrats
and the #MeTooMovement have almost universally supported Blassy Ford. The line,
“A house divided against itself cannot stand!” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address seems to echo in one’s mind as one attempts to ingest and to digest the
ramifications of the current tabloid-type tragedy.

And it is and will be a tragedy no matter how it is ‘resolved.
If the FBI reports nothing additional, and Kavanaugh is confirmed, a higher
than 50% of America will consider the process a miscarriage of justice. Ironic,
that word ‘miscarriage,’ given that the long-term goal of the right-wing cabal
that currently has control of all three institutions of the United States
government is to ‘kill’ Roe v. Wade, that so-called ‘settled law’ that permits
therapeutic abortions and ensures a woman’s right to choose about her own body.

If, on the other hand, Blassy Ford’s riveting testimony
is upheld by even one witness, or the circumstantial evidence tilts in her
direction so far that the nominee’s name is withdrawn, voluntarily or peremptorily
by the president, Kavanaugh’s supporters will be enraged, potentially hostile
and even potentially violent. If the nominee’s demeanour in the afternoon of
Thursday’s addended hearing is any indication, and the responses from the lobby
that supports his nomination through a media blitz of advertising combine to
provide any indication of probable outcomes should his nomination be derailed,
this issue, this nomination and this historic moment will continue to fester,
to boil and to potentially boil over in the November mid-term elections.

Senator Flake’s move to seek a pause through time for
a further investigation, while noble and even honourable, will be a mere hiccup,
depending on the evidence that is uncovered, reported to the White House and
then, hopefully completely and accurately conveyed to the Senate Judicial
Committee. Should Kavanaugh’s nomination founder on the shoal of public opinion,
we all know that another equally if not even more conservative nominee will be
proferred by the White House with an even more intemperate demand that s/he be confirmed
prior to the mid-term elections.

Ironic isn’t it that compressed time, almost into mere
seconds, is now the imperative of the Republicans, those same mostly old white
men, who considered a full calendar year not to be a problem given the nomination
of Merrick Garland by then president Obama on the death of Justice Antonin
Scalia. Time, like money, is a moveable feast or famine, depending on one’s
point of view. And in this case, one’s point of view is a direct reflection of one’s
estimate of what the public will tolerate.

Rex Murphy has written about the inadequate way in
which the media has operated in this debacle. It says here that the public’s
insatiable appetite for a trump-infested diet of lies and braggadocio is also
an underlying and significant motivation for the other older white men who sit
in the board rooms of the major media conglomerates to pursue ratings and profits,
regardless of their source or their integrity. Hourly tweeting by the president
is not, and never should have been, the staple diet of serious media editors
and executives. Just because there is a new technology to which a majority of
people are addicted, and to which the media sources have yet to develop a
responsible filtering process, we and they ought not to have been overwhelmed
and seduced by the president’s narcissistic and tragic ambition. And the
Kavanaugh nomination, albeit one for an important life-long position of serious
judgement, needed as much as any single piece of business and decision, the
kind of serious reflection by the administration, and even more serious
reflection by the media. Jammed into a multi-layered sandwich of tweets and
rally-blusters-bombs about North Korea, Rosenstein, Mueller, Manafort, Cohen,
Flynn, Cushner, NAFTA, and impeachment, the reflective processes of a serious
and stable nation have become unravelled and lie in the newsrooms and in the
bars and even the lecture halls in tatters and shreds.

The demise of truth, one of the more significant casualties
of the war on the establishment perpetrated by the trump-bannon “axis of evil,”
and the concomitant rise of “fake news” to take its place has contributed
significantly to the great divide in public opinion. Each side considers its
view to be based on the facts, when each side demonizes the other, and bases
its view on the “justified” opposition to the other.

Partisanship, to the
degree that it has not only permitted but exacerbated the breakdown in the functioning
of the democratic institutions, showed its pre-eminence in the vitriolic
self-defence offered by Kavanaugh on Thursday afternoon. Touted by some as the ‘new
leader of the Republican Party, Kavanaugh may have, consciously or not, traded
in his application for the Supreme Court job for a new office, as Chairman of
the Republican Party under trump.

If that is what happens, Kavanaugh will have written
his own career biography, given the obvious vacancy of leadership in the Republican
Party and the minimal qualifications for any aspirant, following the example of
the president, to avoid, pay off or simply deny criminal, moral, ethical turpitude,
mostly with cash a willing dupes.

On the other side, Dr. Blassy Ford, trembling,
frightened, tremulous and clearly authentic in both her narrative and her
demeanour, generated a 201% increase in the calls coming into the National Sexual
Assault hotline on the day of the joint testimony. Sexual assault, sexual
impropriety, sexual entitlement and sexual relations have become so radioactive,
politically, legally, culturally in this climate that the lives of both
protagonist (Kavanaugh) and antagonist (Blassy Ford) have been threatened.
Inevitably, also, that radioactivity has over-flowed into this nomination and confirmation
process.

To turn a blind eye to the direct and indirect
responsibility on the president’s shoulders for the current state of the union
would be irresponsible. To turn a deaf ear to the calls for an FBI investigation,
as the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were determined to do until Sen.
Flake called a “time out,” would also be irresponsible. In a nation in which
mental health treatment is so glaringly and blatantly and deliberately absent along
with any tolerance and acceptance of ambiguity, uncertainty, balance, and
shared responsibility, a measured consideration of the complex and mutually
exclusive narratives by the Senate, the media, the #MeTooMovement, the #TimesUp
movement and the opinion polls seems
inconceivable.

The archetype of the war model of “fight-to-the-death”
pervades American history, including the Civil War and ensuring battle for
civil rights that continues today, including the incarceration of thousands of
innocent and mostly men too poor to be able to fund bail, including the willful
murder of innocent black men by white law enforcement officers, including the addiction
to video war games. The income war of disparity between the rich and powerful
against those without political voice, clout, cash and connections, and the
ubiquitous power dominance of white males, as evidenced by the Republican members
of the Judiciary Committee….all of this portends a protracted conflict, without
even a glimpse of reconciliation, between the genders.

Reporting, and making judgements on the reporting that
distorts/omits/distracts from so much of the nuanced complexities and ambiguities
only serves the intellectual appetite and capacity for reductionism, simplicity,
and a binary view of the universe.

Unless and until some significant steps are
envisioned, written about and tolerated in the public media that embrace
uncertainly, ambiguity, tolerance of different opinions, along with the capacity
to debate with authentic dignity, including the deployment of an agreed body of
facts, there is little likelihood that this historic moment will resolve in a
way that provides light in a pitch-dark tunnel where a trump presidency is not
only possible, but apparently looking forward to a second term.

And, for the trump cult, sexual assaults, innuendo,
and mal-feasance be damned!